Archive for Hong Kong

I went to the first day of Barcamp Hong Kong 2013 at HK Polytechnic University on Saturday, 23 February. This was my second Barcamp event. Last year was held all on one-day at City University of Hong Kong. Barcamp is a open-space inspired event where someone with an idea and the desire to talk about it makes a pitch to people who want to listen. The ‘law of two feet’ applies; if it isn’t interesting people can get up and leave for someone else presenting their idea. In practice, people write up very short descriptions of their idea and they are assigned a place to present. People can wander in and out as they like.

I got there on time at 9:45am for a 10:00 am start. This is the first time I’ve seen the 3D barcode registration work with iPhones. There weren’t too many people in the big open plaza at HKPolyU Design School with rows of chairs, a very large digital display screen and sound system. People were rather reluctant to sit in the chairs; I think because it had the ominous ‘lecture-look’ that might be difficult to get out away from easily. Perhaps it might have been better to arrange them in circles. By 11:00am people had filled out some half-size sheets of paper with topics and stuck them up on a brick wall. There was some consolidation as people with similar topics joined forces. Last year I seem to remember that each topic was given 30 minutes and it seemed too short. This year 1 hour seemed better but maybe too long for just one speaker.

The plaza at HKPolyU Design School

My first topic was ‘Fashion & Technology’. I like clothes I suppose about as much as anyone. I’m interested in why I choose the clothes I wear. HK is somewhat of a fashion centre but it suffers from creative anxiety. HK used to be a centre for making clothes and now is a place for organizing the making of clothes in China and then shipping them around the world. I wondered what these people would talk about it. The speaker was trying to get some sense of what people thought ‘fashion & technology’ should be about. People introduced themselves and why they choose to come to this topic. Most people were not working in the fashion field but were interested in wearable technology. I was somewhat amused when someone presented the new idea of using technology to make ‘custom-made’ clothes. I’m old fashioned and I still use a couple of HK tailors for suits, shirts and casual trousers from time to time. These tailors seem to keep track with big bound volumes where they write down my measurements and what I’ve ordered over the past 24 years. It’s nice when they ask me if I still wear the grey plaid jacket I had made in 1996. I think maybe technology and fashion could be used for custom made clothes but I’m not sure it will ever be as personal and good as an in-person tailor.

My second topic was from a grumpy old guy on ‘Lessons from Web 1.0 | That are still true today’. He wasn’t that old but he had been part of that first wave of web-developers in the 1990’s. He now works at one of the large banks in HK on trading algorithms. He made some useful observations that in the Web 1.0 days many plugins and be-spoke browser-sensing approaches were used to improve the web experience. These didn’t work well because most users do not keep their browser up to the latest version with all the appropriate plugins and writing code specific for Netscape, IE and Mosaic very quickly fell-down because it was impossible to test all the possible iterations of OS, hardware and browsers. Guess what? There are now 3 main browsers, IE, Chrome and Firefox and many other smaller ones used widely in specific countries and industries. Many times developers build applications assuming everyone is using the most recent version of Chrome on a high-end personal computer. The application fails and the user walks away. The lesson learned? Do not assume that everyone is a geeky computer person who enjoys hanging out with the PC. Most people do not want to have that much knowledge about the PC. They believe, correctly I will add, the PC should just work without a lot of fuss and bother. He recommended making applications work first with Lynx, a text based browser and then with other browsers. Assume someone in Kenya on a dial-up link is going to use the application. That person in Kenya could be generating 10 cents of revenue and if there are enough of them that could be what makes the application a success. There is an assumption among developers that applications are refreshed and being updated every few years. This is seldom true. Rather than being refreshed applications simply die from lack of use. Useful applications last for a long time and get changed incrementally with the danger that old code is still lurking around and being used as the core for more supposedly advanced applications. In the end, this may cause quite a few problems in the next wave of Web 3.0, 4.0 and 5.0 world.

The last topic was Open Data in Hong Kong. The HK government has had the Data.One initiative since 2011 to make datasets available to the public for no cost. First, a developer presented his open source application using the HK Observatory (HKO) data. He hadn’t used the datasets available from Data.One for two reasons. First, he didn’t know the HKO dataset was available and second when he did find out about the dataset it was only a simple RSS text file and was not useful. Instead, he simply captured (scraped) the data from the websites maintained by the HKO. Next, someone talked about the Data.One initiative, the background and what was now happening. The gist of it seems to be that the government wants to make datasets available but not much effort if being made to coordinate what, why, how and who. Departmental Administrative Officers (AO) makes the datasets available based on their personal networks. The AO is an important person in the HK government structure but he/she is frequently very over-worked and normally has limited technical IT skills or knowledge. These AO’s have networks inside the government and they use for all sorts of activities. There is nothing wrong with this approach but the Data.One datasets are rather hit and miss. The last person talked about the context of Open Data initiatives in the EU and elsewhere. She said that the most active Open Data initiatives were in Berlin, London and New York. The big question is how to have more knowledge about the datasets and more use of them for application development. After these talks a Google+ group, Open Data Hong Kong, was setup. Hopefully, this may become a platform to promote these Data.One datasets.

Back in April 2011 I went to a Birds of the Feather event sponsored by BrightIdea, see here for my posting on that event. At the event one of the examples of an innovation was the use of digital pen technology to collect information on forms by workers in the field. I didn’t know what they meant by digital pens but soon learned that it was a combination of a pen and some special paper. The pen and paper let normal handwriting be captured and transferred to a digital format without any scanning.

I was intrigued because this is a particular pain point in many explicit knowledge management/document management projects I’ve worked on over the years. Trying to convince people to change from handwritten forms to online input forms is fraught with hardship and resistance. The arguments pro and con usually go something like this:

– The handwritten form is easy to use, can be signed for authorization and can then be retained as an authenticated final copy.

– The online form is difficult to use, requires a computer, a printer and a scanner and a whole lot of training.

– The handwritten form is difficult to share. We have to scan it and input the data manually and then verify the input. This slows down the workflow.

– We must have a printed and signed form for compliance purposes. We want a true, unchangeable authenticated copy so we will have to print the form, sign it and then scan it.

The core digital pen technology comes from the Swedish company Anoto. The technology has been licensed to other companies. For example, PaperIQ Digital Pen for Blackberry solution, and LiveScribe that produces digital pens combined with digital audio recorders.

In June 2011, I got in touch with Big Prairie Limited a local Hong Kong company that provide consulting services for Anoto based digital pens technology. Big Prairie has been working in the digital pen area in Asia for about ten years.

In exchange for helping out at the Big Prairie booth at the Greater China eHealth Forum 2011 on 7-8 October I was given a LiveScribe Echo 4GB digital pen. I didn’t agree to blog about the digital pen technology and no one from Big Prairie has reviewed this blog. Just to be clear, I got 1 pen, 3 notebooks and some software with a retail value of about HKD1,700 (about USD220) in exchange for 2 days of work at the forum. Clearly, I’m really a cheap date.

I prepared some demos and for two days I demonstrated the LiveScribe Echo digital pen. Subsequently, I’ve been using the pen almost every day and showing it around to my network. People are very impressed with the technology. The pen is a normal ball-point pen with a small camera and a digital recorder and player. The pen is lightweight and a bit big but still comfortable for writing. The pen can be used as just a normal ball-point pen or used with the Anoto dot paper to record what you are writing. The notebook is made from normal notebook paper which as been printed with thousands of very small blue-colored dots. These dots are locational markers; when combined with the camera your writing is recorded precisely and accurately. The digital recorder can be used stand-alone or it synchronizes with your handwritten notes. The notebook has printed commands at the bottom of the page that let you turn on, pause, turn off the audio recording, jump ahead in 10 second intervals, bookmark, jump to a % position, set the playback speed and adjust the volume of the playback. The small speaker on the pen is good enough for listening or you can buy some headphones that plug into the pen for both better listening quality and recording quality. You can play back an audio recording by simply touching any of the synchronized handwritten text.

I don’t want to go over all of the features of the LiveScribe pen because that information is easily available and better explained on the LiveScribe website.

The handwritten notes and recording can be easily exported to Adobe pdf format. This is called a pencast. I’ve made some pencast examples that illustrate what I think are the important points. Download these pencasts and open with Acrobat Reader version 9.3.2 or higher.

1. A pencast with handwritten notes and audio recording by listening to the BBC One-minute news broadcast. Pencast no 1 ….
– The black text has no synchronized recording.
– The green text has synchronized recording.
– Click on the green text to listen to the recording. The remaining green text will go light grey. You can jump around by clicking on the green or light grey text.

2. A pencast with handwritten notes, audio and a quick sketch. Added a few days’ later handwritten notes and audio recording from a BBC One-minute news broadcast. Pencast no 2 ….
– It captures the sketch easily and accurately.
– Notes and recordings can be added at different times.

3. A pencast of “Double Ninth: Missing my Shandong Brothers”, with handwritten Chinese characters, Putonghua pinyin and English translation. There is no audio recording. This is a poem that almost all Chinese children learn in school. Pencast no 3 ….
九月九日憶山東兄弟
獨在異鄉為異客,
每逢佳節倍思親.
遙知兄弟登高處,
遍插茱萸少一人.

As a lonely stranger in a strange land,
At every holiday my homesickness increases.
Far away, I know my brothers have reached the peak;
They are planting flowers, but one is not present.

Handwritten notes can be converted to text using the MyScriptforLiveScribe tool from a company named VisionObjects . It costs about USD30.00. It is very easy to use from within the LiveScribe Desktop.

Here are the results.
1. A pencast with handwritten notes and audio recording by listening to the BBC One-minute news broadcast converted to text and then saved as a JPG. Pencast no 5 …
– As a JPG file it retains the layout and format of the handwritten notes.

2. A pencast with handwritten notes and audio recording by listening to the BBC One-minute news broadcast converted to text and then saved as a DOCX. Pencast no 6 ….
– It loses the layout and the format.
– The text can be edited.
– The text has 401 written letters and 10 errors marked in red so the error rate was 2.49%. This is remarkable for conversion of handwritten text to type text. I did a project last year where scanning handwriting and then converting to type text the error rates was between 25% to 50%. See here for information on ICR, intelligent character recognition.

3. A pencast of “Double Ninth: Missing my Shandong Brothers”, Chinese characters, Putonghua pinyin and English translation. I’ve converted the Chinese characters to text, the Putonghua pinyin to text and the English translation to text and saved as a DOCX. Pencast no 7 ….
– There are 37 characters in the original text plus 2 characters of the author’s name. There are 6 errors marked in red. The error rate is 15.38%. Once again, this is remarkable for handwritten Chinese character to type text conversion.
– There are 199 handwritten letters and diacritic marks in the Putonghua pinyin. There are 29 errors marked in red. The error rate is 19.33%. It is high because MyScriptforLiveScribe doesn’t have a dictionary for Putonghua pinyin.
– There are 188 handwritten letters and punctuation marks in the English translation. There are 15 errors marked in red. The error rate is 7.98%.

4. A pencast of Japanese kana and kanji. This text only has hiragana and kanji characters converted to characters and then saved as a DOCX. Pencast no 8 ….
– 65 handwritten hiragana and kanji.
– 3 errors marked in red. The error rate is 4.62%. Once again, this is remarkable. Projects in Japan I’ve worked on with handwritten Japanese to text conversion are lucky to get the error rate down to 25%.

The LiveScribe solution is for personal note-taking. It is most useful for students, business people, professionals such as lawyers, doctors, advisors and anyone who takes notes which is just about anybody. Being able to record the audio along with the notes can significantly increase the value of the notes and can improve your ability to add to the notes later. Being able to create a PDF pencast makes the notes easy to share with others. Being able to convert them into type text makes it much easier to produce formal reports from handwritten notes. I recommend it highly for an effective and inexpensive solution for taking notes and keeping them digitally.

There are enterprise solutions enabling forms to be created and specialized workflows integrated to enterprise backend solutions using the Anoto digital pen technology. You should contact Big Prairie Limited or Anoto for more information.

I went to an Education & IT Conference on 29 April here in Hong Kong. It was for the full-day and there was cross-section of education researchers from universities around Hong Kong, heads of IT Services for universities, colleges and K-12 international schools and a few others such as the CIO for the International Baccalaureate program. The focus was on how to use technology in schools and what works and what doesn’t work. There was a lot of discussion on the disconnect between what technology skills and equipment students bring with them into the classroom versus what technology a school and/or teacher can reasonably be expected to provide. The word ‘digital native’ popped up many times with various feelings on if they exist and what they may or may not be able to do with technology. Clearly the feeling was that young people are frustrated with ‘how they learn’ and they ‘want to be more engaged’. There were many examples of students using video and audio to create content for assignments collaboratively. There was a need to change the physical setting of the classroom to make it easier for students to interact and collaborate. Many times it was mentioned that teachers needed to learn how to teach using more collaborative processes and not be intimidated by technology. The process of getting teachers to learn more collaboratively among themselves was a theme repeated over and over.

My perspective on learning and teaching is that in the past 5 years I’ve been in student in 3 different full-time learning programmes. I think this is a bit unusual for someone my age. I got the typical mid-career corporate lay-off in 2007 and at the age of 51 I decided I would re-train and do something new. This is a cautionary tale on teaching old dogs new tricks.

I was an unqualified English teacher in at the Beijing Second Foreign Language Institute, 1988-1989, and in Hong Kong at the Sear Rogers International School, 1989-1990, and I rather enjoyed it although I had no idea what I was doing in the classroom. So, in 2007 I enrolled in the Hong Kong British Council Certificate in English Language Training for Young Learners offered jointly with Cambridge University. There were 9 students and 2 teachers. We had a few weeks of lectures and then we started actually observing and teaching. During the lectures we sat at 2 round tables in well-appointed rooms with very fancy ‘interactive white-boards’ which integrated with presentation software, video and audio files. The teachers were sort of OK with using it but frequently complained on ‘how hard it was to use’. We did some observations of real classes at the British Council and they all used the ‘interactive white-boards’. Teachers had a wide range of user skills and techniques. Recently I’ve done some research of the British Council and I notice there is a thread these ‘interactive white-boards’ were expensive and not that well taken up in many cases. I finished the programme and got my certificate and in no-way felt qualified to go-out and teach anyone English. I was mostly just shell-shocked and exhausted. Almost 4 years later I can say that I’ve not made any significant use of my English language teacher training as a teacher. I tutored a few Japanese students the next year when living in Japan but nothing since then. However, this experience gave me many insights into the learning process. Sitting and working collaboratively was very useful for the course whereas the fancy ‘interactive white-boards’ were not that critical to the learning process.

Next I moved to Okazaki, Japan to study Japanese full-time at the Aichi Center for Japanese Studies, more commonly known as ‘Yamasa’. I had been studying Japanese with a private tutor for about a year so I had some back-ground. I was in a class of 12 from 9am – 4pm Monday to Thursday and Friday 9am – 2pm. I also had one-on-one private tuition 3 times a weeks. Ten of my classmates were ‘digital natives’ all under 23 years old. There was one woman in her mid-thirties. It was a very international group; UK, USA, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Sweden, Portugal, France, Korea. Just some observations: there was hardly any technology used in the classroom although we all had laptops in our rooms and used them for some sort of looking up and memorizing exercises. The physical environment was just a big table we all sat around and were usually cold or hot. The Japanese don’t put a lot of belief in making the physical learning environment comfortable. We all got the impression that learning for the Japanese was like ‘going to war’. Many times students said they wished we could just sit by ourselves at desks. We watched videos on a wheeled in TV on a cart occasionally just like I remembered doing in the 1960’s in south Georgia. We used the classic foreign language acquisition methodology of the teacher only using the target language (all Japanese all the time) and the students did role-plays, scenes, drew pictures, made newspapers, wrote letters to friends (real and imaginary), made videos and went on little trips to the post office, the corner shops, and so on. We should have spoken Japanese to each other all the time but really we only did haltingly and just used English because it was the lingua franca for the group. There were tests at least once a day and every 3 weeks a grueling 3 hours examination to test proficiency on what had been ‘learned’. I never did very well on any of these tests or examinations. My classmates were not very interested in collaborative type activities and preferred to simply study and memorize alone in their rooms and then go to the local bar, get drunk and forget they were in Japan. I stayed there 9 months and then left to return to Hong Kong. I will forever be able to read and write a simple note in Japanese and order food in a noodle shop when I’m in Japan. I can’t understand very well at all when spoken to but people seem to understand when I say something. I still wonder why I did this but I do have a feeling it was useful in an odd abstract sort of way. I put this in the category of ‘learning for learning’s sake’.

Next, I returned to Hong Kong and the winds of the global financial tsunami were in the air. I enrolled into the MSc Knowledge Management Program at Hong Kong Polytechnic University. This is a blended learning programme with some face-to-face activities and some online activities. They were using the WEBCT learning managing system (LMS), which I know now to be rather a dinosaur LMS. I liked the WEBCT and it was interesting to read lessons online and then attend the lectures. The course work was frequently group based. The programme was primarily designed for full-time workers to do over a 2 or 3-year period. I did the whole programme in 15 months full-time just because it was impossible to find a job in Hong Kong at that time. Doing group course work required a lot of time to organize physical and virtual meetings, set deadlines and monitor progress. Some of them were very rewarding and some were very frustrating. Simply put, it all depended on the team. I leaned how to use many collaborative online tools that I would never have used otherwise because of the group course work. I did well in the programme and felt that I had really learned quite a lot about knowledge organization approaches and methodologies. I’m using what I learned in the programme everyday now. Learning technology was well-used even if it wasn’t that most up-to-date and sophisticated learning technology available. The emphasis on group learning was far more important and useful than the technology.

The caution is that I really could only learn successfully in a context where it was meaningful for me based on my experience. Using technology was not the significant factor and group collaborative learning was much more important all 3 programmes. Being an English teacher may be useful some day but it wasn’t what I really wanted to do in 2007/2008. Leaning Japanese seemed exotic but the reality was memorizing 3 scripts and hundreds of vocabulary items every week and I couldn’t see any definite end-goal for what I would do with it if and when I learned Japanese. Learning about knowledge management fit into the context of what I had been doing in the records and information management field at New York University, Philip Morris and the HK Chep Lap Kok airport construction project. I learned and could put it into a context of past experience and it made sense to me where I could use this newly acquired knowledge. So if you are going to be an old dog learning something new then I recommend you stay in your field and focus on branching out and widening your horizons in your field. I wouldn’t recommend trying to learn something too radically different because it may not fit in with your view of yourself and you might have a difficult time seeing how you will use this new knowledge.

On 18 April I went to the Birds of a Feather, BOF, sharing event sponsored by CLP, China Light & Power, and Bright Idea. CLP has been using Bright Idea’s idea innovation suite Webstorm, Switchboard and Pipeline for about 18 months. These BOF events are a way for current users, just the plain interested like myself, and Bright Idea to get together to share their experiences and thoughts on innovation. It isn’t a sales event except for about 20 minutes at the end when Matthew Greeley gives a low-key introduction to innovation and how Bright Idea’s products can support it. It was well-organized and shows a lot of generosity on both Bright Idea’s and CLP’s part.

Everyone (note the big ‘E’ as my Aunt Sue would say) is talking about ‘Innovation’. ‘Managing innovation’ raises the same issues for many people as ‘managing knowledge’; can it be done successfully, how can you manage something so ethereal, how do you measure the outcome and so on? First, I should say I don’t ever truly believe we ‘manage knowledge’ but we can enable the processes around it; how it is created, how to share it, how to avoid losing it, how to recognize it when it becomes a bit hidden and shy. Second, ‘enabling innovation’ is possible if what we mean is letting ideas be proposed by a wide audience, reviewing them for value, supporting them by prototyping and piloting and sharing the results with a wide audience so there is learning taking place that can be applied to the next round of enabled innovation.

Some of the participants had been using Bright Idea’s products for several years and some for only a few months. Everyone agreed the product suite is useful but what I heard over and over again was that the processes around using the product suite were critical. There needed to be focused innovation campaigns within a short period of time, 2 to 6 weeks seemed to be a good, when ideas were collected. There needs to be a hands on ‘campaign management team’ to promote and review the ideas submitted. A lot of ideas would be submitted and people needed to know what happened to ‘their idea’ or they got discouraged and didn’t participate in the next campaign. Even good ideas are not necessarily going to lead to implemented pilots and prototypes and people need to know why. It all takes times so don’t become impatient or anxious. There are different types of innovation and some take much longer than others to implement inside an organization. Realistically, you may not see real innovation impact for 2 or 3 years.

I went to the Online Information Asia-Pacific exhibition and 2-day conference on this past Wednesday and Thursday, 23 – 24 March, at the Hong Kong Convention & Exhibition Centre, conference program here. There was also a 1-day Business Information Forum which I did not attend. All was organized by IncisiveMedia based in London. I was a member of the ‘Conference Committee’, which means I made some suggestions on speakers, marketing and promotion. The exhibitors were primarily compilers and resellers of information for academic libraries and businesses. Maybe there were 50+ exhibitors. The exhibition was free and there were some free seminars. It seemed to me that there were never more than 50 people at the 2-day conference but someone told me about 100 had registered. Turn-out for both the free exhibition and the conference could have been better but for a first year effort it was quite good. Hopefully, the 2012 exhibition and conference will be better attended.

All of the speakers were good and here is the program. The 1st day was more technological and the 2nd day was more knowledge enabling. Eric Tsui from the HKPolyU facilitated the 1st day. Waltraut Ritter facilitated the 2nd day. Some of the highlights for me were:

David Warlock, from Outsell, highlighted that the tablet is a ‘game-changing’ device like the IBM PC in the 1980’s. Its 5-year projected adoption rate is faster than any new ‘information’ device. What does this mean for information management? He didn’t claim to know that clearly. For me the big change is in ‘usage’. It’s all about ‘gestural computing’. People expect to be able to manipulate the device with a gesture. By the way, I don’t have any gestural devices but I intend to get my first iPhone4 soon.

Bonnie Cheuk, from Citi, focused on the leadership skills to make using Web 2.0 social networking tools work in a large corporate environment. Bonnie has solid academic credentials and deep and successful big organization experience so I listen carefully to what she says. Bonnie has been using Sharepoint at two large organizations to facilitate online interaction, networking and discussion. I would say she is trying to do online ‘Knowledge Café’, ‘Open Space Technology’, ‘Bohm Dialouge’ and ‘Anecdote Circles’. She cautioned about getting over involved in the looking for the ‘best technology’; make what you have work, it isn’t about the technology. She is trying to move away from ‘anything goes conversations’ to focused and structured interactions.
She didn’t say this exactly but I took away that Leaders 2.0 need these traits for using Web 2.0 in their organizations:
• Passion – they must be internally motivated to want to use these tools
• Commitment – they have to ‘stay the course’ and ‘stay on track’ and ‘spend time to learn’
• Openness – they have to both listen to others and give their own opinion, feedback and expertise freely
• Fearlessness – they must stand-up to the nay-sayers, to the people who say ‘I told you this won’t work’

Diane Cmor, from Hong Kong Baptist University, talked about ‘information literacy’ and how that requires a ‘practice’ and a ‘mind-set’ to become a ‘Knowledgeable Knowledge Worker’. A KWW needs these attributes:
• Expertise – stay current and know how to find what you need
• Judgement – know when to stop looking
• Mess tolerant – see past the mess of information and use it, don’t spend too much time on organization
• Multi-focal – see the patterns and embrace serendipity
• Social – share and exchange openly and transparently widely with the world
She had a very good working definition of knowledge:
Regular, wise use of best suited information to build, change and/or challenge knowledge in support of decision-making, problem-solving, innovation and growth.

Louise Pemberton, from Kroll, gave an excellent description of ‘real-world’ information management at a risk and security investigation firm. It is all about guiding the users, training and re-training, setting up the same look-and-feel across the Sharepoint sites and emphasizing that not all information in online. Some information comes from people and there are real skills and techniques to use when asking for information from people. Interestingly, Kroll has tried to use some of the Web 2.0 techniques like blogging and expertise pages and they didn’t ‘have much traction’. This is what I’ve also observed and experienced.

Catherine Ruggieri, from Elliott Management, spoke about morphing from a traditional corporate librarian into a hedge-fund Market Data Manager and how she took on the IT Department and won thru persistence and guile. She reminded us all that it’s about making it happen and showing real value to the organization that give information management recognition inside the organization.

Steve Arnold, from ArnoldIT, facilitated a to-the-point panel discussion at the end of the first day on the state of ‘Search’. He kept the panel focused and they had insightful answers. It was a good example of running a structured content meeting.

Paul Corney, from Sparknow, facilitated all of us to give-back what we had gotten out of the conference at the end of the 2nd day. He used these in his introduction to get us started sharing:
• Solutions – make in relevant
• Sound – evokes memory and place
• Space – enables interaction
• Heritage – gives people a starting point
• Stories – enables sharing across the generations of workers in a organization

For most of this past year I’ve been working on a project that involved searching for Chinese people in various online databases using their Romanized names or their Chinese character names. When you are searching for someone’s Chinese name inside a database there are some quite thorny issues. With the rise of China as the world’s 2nd largest economy and Chinese people traveling and spending more and more around the world these issues about identifying Chinese people by their names are going to become a part of many knowledge workers day-to-day tasks. Here is the definition of Greater China from Wikipeida.

Most of the time trying to find a Chinese person among many other Chinese people in a database by name is not very successful. Most of the problems are around ‘Romanization’ and ‘Simplification and Traditional Chinese characters’. If you are interested in ‘Romanization’ see this Wikipeida entry. The ‘Romanization’ problem is that there are simply too many methods and no real standard.

In mainland China, people are by law required to use ‘simplified’ characters for their names. This assumes that there is a ‘simplified’ character for that name. In Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan people use ‘traditional’ characters for their names. If you are interested in the difference refer to this Wikipedia entry. In any event, ‘simplification’ is a master stroke of censorship and knowledge control by the mainland Chinese government. Mainland Chinese have difficulty reading books, pamphlets and newspapers from outside of China. What better way could there be of controlling knowledge than by changing the writing system people use every day? Conversely, people from Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan have a difficult time reading ‘simplified’ characters. Some claim it is harder to go from ‘Simplified’ to ‘Traditional’ than from ‘Traditional’ to ‘Simplified’ but I’m not sure. Reading Chinese is always hard for me and I’ve learned both character sets, sort of, up to the 1,000 character mark.

However, since there are different character sets a problem arises when someone from mainland China comes to Hong Kong, Macau or Taiwan and start to use their written character name to open accounts at banks, shops, hotels and so on. The same happens when people from Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan go to mainland China. Simply put, people can’t easily read this person’s name. The solution is to ‘transform’ the name into the ‘correct’ character set; ‘Simplified’ Character to ‘Traditional’ Character or ‘Traditional’ Character to ‘Simplified’ Character. It happens all the time when a person opens an account where there details will be input into a database. They write down their name in the character set they are comfortable with using and the person either collecting the names or the data-input person ‘transforms’ this name. Interestingly, all Hong Kong and Macau Chinese people may apply for a ‘home return permit‘ card that lets them cross the border into China easily, and also lets the Chinese government know they have arrived. Their names are always ‘transformed’ into simplified characters when there is corresponding character between the ‘traditional’ character and the ‘simplified’ character. I assume these transformations are more accurate than some of the others. I know some of the transformations between ‘simplified’ to ‘traditional’ are not always accurate. This is due to imperfect knowledge of the mapping rules between the character sets. Sometimes people are in too much a hurry so they simply guess. All Chinese names have at least 2 characters and many, maybe the majority, have 3 characters. Sometimes the transformer will transform 1 or 2 characters and leave 1 or 2 character unchanged.

The end result is that if even if you have a Chinese person’s correct name you may not be able to find it in a database because someone has ‘transformed’ the name. Sometimes you can’t find a Chinese person in a database because you believe their name is written with character ‘X’ but in fact they write it with character ‘Y’. The only way to solve this problem is for the database’s search engine to ‘normalize’ the search. Here is an excellent summary of ‘normalization’ prepared by Michael CY Chan.

Continuing from Part 1…. So, David gave us the 15 minute history of the genesis of his knowledge café. Basically he use to go to these KM lectures in the City and the best part was the conversation in the pub after the talking head. It’s an absolute truth that the ‘afterwards’ ‘coffee/tea breaks’ ‘meeting in the morning’ are the most useful for understanding what will, has or may be useful at a organized speaking event. Afterwards, we had the useful coffee/tea break with excellent coffee, tea and pastries.

We returned and the 8 Make Award winners each gave a 3 minute introduction of themselves ~ at this point I was about ready to scream with frustration ~ where was the Knowledge Café? It was useful to get the introductions but it could have happened at 9:30 and not 10:45. The Hong Kong Make Award winners who participated are: (there are others who did not participate)

The actual café was in 2 sections. One of the Make Award winners sat at a table and we first listened and then had sort of a conversation about what sort of KM activities and strategies they had deployed or were now deploying. It was a bit stilted because we needed to ‘listen’ to the winner and then respond. Each section lasted about 45 minutes. The second section was much better than the first. By the second section people knew what to expect and there had been the all-important trust established at the tables. This was a point that Nicolas had made earlier in the morning and I heard over and over again at the tables from the Award winners. There must be trust established with the employees before they would participate in any knowledge-sharing activities.

The essential flaw in the programme was that we only had time for two 45-minute sections and there wasn’t enough time to establish a solid level of trust among the participants. At the end, Eva LO, Director of Knowledge Management from Langham Place Hotel said she noticed she wanted to ‘lecture’ and I could observe that in the 1st section but less so in the 2nd section. The format made the Make Award winners the ‘teachers’ and us the ‘students’. So, in retrospect it was better than the normal talking head conference but it could have been better with both more time and someway of minimizing the ‘teacher’ ‘student’ format. Maybe if there had been a general KM topic to discuss this would have enabled more open and fluid conversations. I think we all felt obligated to listen to the ‘masters’ and not ask too many questions.

We ended with one of those excellent Hong Kong 8 course Chinese lunches and some good conversation. As David said in his introduction its always the ‘afterwards’ which is the best.